TITLE: BETWEEN STATIONS — a night radio
PROMPT: Design 'BETWEEN STATIONS', a late-night radio tuner. Faceplate: warm walnut and brushed aluminum (CSS textures), a horizontal frequency scale with a draggable red needle, an analog VU meter with bouncing ballistics, and a tuning eye that winks with signal strength. The dial sweeps real WebAudio: noise beds that resolve into five stations as you tune — a numbers station (synth beeps + spoken-ish morse), drone ambient, static, a distant swing loop (simple synth), an emergency tone — with an LED confirming lock (all synthesized locally, gesture-gated). Interactions: drag the needle (with fine inertia), station preset buttons snap-tune with needle glide, volume knob rotates on drag. Dusty, analog, mysterious.
DESCRIPTION: A 1958 walnut-and-cream superheterodyne receiver: wood-grain cabinet, speaker grille, an ivory dial glass with a hand-built FM scale (87.5–108 MHz, major/minor ticks, band labels) and a glowing red needle with inertia glide. Dragging the needle tunes through a bandpass noise bed into four fully synthesized stations — The Numbers Station (morse CQ NIGHT at 880Hz pips), Drone Field 3 (detuned sawtooth chord through a lowpass), Midnight Swing (walking bass + ride ticks at 260ms), and Lighthouse Beacon (double-pip every 2s) — with gaussian lock profiles, off-station pitch drift, and a magic-eye tuning tube whose shadow wedge closes as signal strengthens. A ballistics-damped VU needle, a rotary volume knob (drag or arrows), and preset buttons that glide-tune the needle complete the instrument.
TECHNIQUES: CSS wood-grain and brushed-aluminum faceplate, generated dial scale with gaussian signal-lock math, WebAudio graph (looping bandpass noise bed, per-station voice systems with interval sequencers, morse table), magic-eye conic-gradient shadow wedge driven by signal quality, exponential-damped VU needle physics, pointer-capture needle tuning with inertia, cubic-eased preset glide tuning, rotary drag knob.
INTERACTION: Drag across the dial glass to tune (needle has inertia on release); presets snap-glide to stations; the volume knob rotates by dragging (or arrow keys); everything audio is created only after the first gesture; the readout shows frequency, station name and lock LED live.